Promotional Products Startup Guide For New Companies If you have either bought or are starting a new business from the ground up, one of your most immediate needs is to establish your brand in the market place as soon as possible. Certainly one of the best and most cost effective ways to accomplish this is with the help of promotional products. However, I am not writing this article to convince you of the importance of using promotional products but rather to help you with the process of implementing this type of marketing approach. In this article, I will be discussing a kind of mental checklist that will be necessary to help make this process go much more smoothly for you. Keep in mind that I will be providing you a general rather than a comprehensive guide to the ordering process as with more than 850,000 promotional products and growing in our industry I could not in this small article cover all the necessary guidelines for ordering each product. Nevertheless, I will address some of the key considerations that will help you in the selection and ordering process for most promotional products.
One of the first areas in this process you must address is to come up with a budget. Your thinking here should be first to come up with a total budget and then to break that total budget into segments which should include a price range for each promotional product you want to order. Don't forget to compensate for costs other than the actual product in your budget such as shipping, taxes, and any fulfillment costs that might be incurred in delivering or packaging the promotional item. As part of this budgetary process you will want to decide on how many different types of promotional items you will want to purchase. Once you have decided on how many promotional products you will be using in your marketing effort, you will need to figure out how many of each individual item you will want to order. This really then becomes more of a mathematical function of how many promotional items you will be ordering and how much you have budgeted for the entire promotional product program. With the financial aspect of the promotional product program figured out your thought process should move to the marketing aspects so you can then zero in on the precise products that will accomplish your branding mission. This is where you need to begin to ask yourself some important questions. It is through the questioning process that you will define your entire approach to getting the appropriate and most effective promotional product and still stay within your budget. Questions such as: who will you be targeting with these promotional products? What is the message and impression you want the product to convey to the person receiving it? Where will the promotional product be given out? Although I can think of many more questions that I as a professional would